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Yesterday, after ten years of eating what most of my friends referred to as twigs and bark, I finally ate what they consider to be “real food.” After a decade of having a cow-free mouth, I chewed and swallowed a 1/2-pound of cow at happy hour.

It was an interesting experience. I didn’t feel any guilt about it at the time; after all, killing an animal was never the reason I gave up eating meat in the first place. I became a vegetarian after learning about all of the hormones that go into today’s meat. But the piece of a cow that I ate belonged to a cow who was “hormone-free and grass feed.”

It’s pretty crazy to me that those things even need to be on a menu. Cow’s digestive systems aren’t meant to eat anything but grass, but something tells me the people who don’t know this, or care to know this, are fine to eat any type of cow, even the mad ones which feed on bits of other cows and newspapers and all sorts of things. And I’m sure they don’t care that the typical cow ingests more pharmaceuticals than Janis Joplin did in her lifetime.

After I starter to think about it, I started replaying vegetarian-propaganda bumper stickers over and over in my head- meat is murder. And then I started to feel badly about it.

But I’d like to the think the piece of cow that I ate came from a really depressed cow; one that kept itself in really great shape, but deep down was really just unhappy with life and was going to commit suicide any day now. I’d also like to think that if the cow knew how to read and write, it would’ve written a suicide note that stated, “When I’m gone, please serve me up on an onion bun with garlic lemon aioli, pepper bacon, lettuce, onion, tomato, and a choice of Rogue blue cheese or Tillamook white cheddar, ketchup and mustard, with an ice-cold IPA.”

Then I read the menu a bit closer and saw the piece of cow I ate came from a place in Oregon called Strawberry Mountain. I started to think about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought of how wonderful Strawberry Mountain sounded. In fact, Strawberry Mountain sounds like the nicest, happiest place on earth. Who could be depressed there? Surely not a cow who sat around all day in the sun eating grass; one who had no care in the world until its life was cut tragically short and then served up to me on an onion bun with garlic lemon aioli, pepper bacon, lettuce, onion, tomato, and Tillamook white cheddar, ketchup and mustard, with an ice-cold IPA. Damn it! Now I feel like an asshole. I should’ve never eaten that bit of cow!

But what’s done is done, and now I feel like I owe it to that cow to at least let it spend the rest of eternity with those it knew and loved. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to happy hour; I’ve got a reunion to attend to.